Day Two: An Unexpected Reunion
[ Posted by Rebecca Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:24:34 GMT ]
A long time ago, in another life when I was someone else, I had a friend. Yes, a friend. Hard to believe it, I know.
Anyway, we were a lot alike, or so it seemed. She and I were raised in the same kind of church. We both loved to write, and we were both working on Astronomy degrees at the university. We even lived in the same apartment building, rode the same bus, etc. We both had boyfriends at the time, too.
We always had fun together, and we hung out a lot. She was better at math than I was, and I was depressed and couldn’t get out of bed and go to class most days. So I copied her math homework, bombed all the exams, and got bad grades. She didn’t even get mad at me until the end of the semester.
She was really into her boyfriend. She had given up her virginity to him and was madly in love with him. By madly in love with him I mean she was blind to all his gross faults (and they were gross…he was a sex addict) and thought he hung the moon.
They broke up once but were still living together. I took that opportunity to tell her that she could do better, that she deserved better, that he needed serious help and that she got out at a good time. I was trying to be a good friend, and in my mind, a good friend always tells the truth, even if it’s hard for the other person to hear.
A week later they were back together. A few months later they got engaged. At some point, something happened and my friendship with her ended…it probably had to do with my copying her homework. Anyway they got married. Six years ago they got married. She fell out of my mind with the passing time until I nearly forgot she existed.
“Hindsight is 20-20,” she said yesterday when she showed up in my office to speak to a professor. I hadn’t seen her in six years and we both did double-takes when we saw each other. We fell easily into conversation, as if the friendship had never ended. My heart was overloaded with reservations, and still is, but I was struck by how easy it was to talk to her, and how much I still cared for her in my heart. I guess some love never really goes away, even if you forget about it for awhile.
Anyway, she’s divorced now. His addiction was too much for her. It controlled him to the point that she lost the freedom she should have had with him in marriage.
“Hindsight is 20-20,” she said.
“I’m 28 and I feel old,” she said. I know why she feels old. She’s already lived a lifetime of pain and she hasn’t even hit thirty yet. It makes me sad. It makes me hurt for her.
It also makes me glad that I didn’t go down the path she went down. I was presented with the same set of paths she was presented. Somehow, by the grace of God, I managed to choose a better path. A path with less unnecessary pain.
Geez, life is hard enough without the unnecessary pain.
I guess I’m writing this because it’s weird that she randomly walked back into my life yesterday. Except that I don’t think she randomly did. You can call it coincidence or whatever you want. I call it God.
I’m a big fan of praying for people from my past who I remember, or who God brings up before me. I know I need to start there with her.
We exchanged information so we could keep in touch, but I still have a load of reservations. I can’t handle another person leeching off me right now. I don’t have that kind of energy to give. But maybe with her I won’t have to. I dunno. I just know that God put her back in my mind for a reason. I know because he does that with me a lot. Sometimes I see the fruit of my prayers, and sometimes I don’t. Maybe obedience is doing what you’re lead to do even if you never see the point of it. So I’ll pray for her, as hard as I can as often as I remember.
